


so much hell to sell you

by Laylah, roachpatrol



Series: Imperial Pop Star [5]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Black/Pale Reacharound, Caliginous Romance, Class Issues, Fight Sex, M/M, Pop Star AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-21
Updated: 2013-02-21
Packaged: 2017-11-30 00:17:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/693174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laylah/pseuds/Laylah, https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“How the fuck did you get in here,” he demands.</p>
<p>“Pizza delivery,” you say, mildly. “I did warn you.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	so much hell to sell you

You know the exact minute Sollux Captor comes home to a busted-in hiveportal. You feel it in your bones, a psionic shockwave that shiver-crawls all through you, and you can hear the very slight sound of air crackling as he drifts cautiously through his hive.

Then he finds you in his dusty ruin of a nutrition block, and drops with a sharp slap of shoes to tile. “How the fuck did you get in here,” he demands.

“Pizza delivery,” you say, mildly. “I did warn you.” You knee the cookification cube’s door shut on the freeze-dried pizza. It should be reconstituted in half an hour. With any luck the two of you are going to need it by then. He’s a lowblood, too, so maybe you should have brought multiple pizzas, but you’d always ended your movie bro-dates up at the cheapass snackshop by the theatre, bickering over which single disc you were gonna split the bill for, and you’d thought you’d bring just the one disc in his least favorite flavor for kicks, just to make him laugh and shove you and complain.

But now things are different and you’re both a crucial handful of seasons older, and that indefinable tension to your friendship has been _defined_. Instead of complaining at the smell of pepperoni he just snarls wordlessly, and your whole body goes weightless. He whips you around to face him, your center of gravity churning, your toes dragging on the tile, and every cell of your body alight with the thrill of threat. He’s never used his psionics to do more than frizz your hair before.

God, he’s tall for a lowblood—at least a few inches on Eridan, and built completely different. He’s so shockingly skinny in comparison to the Amporas’ sculpted sleekness: his bare arms are ropey, his shirt’s hanging loose around his waist, his rough-clawed fingers are nearly skeletal. You can’t believe you ever thought he was cool. He looks like a roadie with a wasting disease. You can’t believe you _still_ think he’s cool. He’s unkempt and ill-dressed and looking at you like he can’t quite believe you’re real, either, like he’s more nervous about fucking this all up than you are, and you’re so nervous your palms are sweaty. If he doesn’t kiss you you’re going to die.

When in doubt: say something dumb, and smile real big for the cameras.

“I hope you know you’re going to pay me back for the pizza,” you tell him, “by _inches_ ,” and you cup his crotch. Then you show him all your teeth.

The next second you’re pinned up against the thermal hull, his forearm a tight bar against your chest and your thighs around his hips. You’ve known his tongue’s forked for awhile—it’s hard to miss, once you’ve met the guy in person—but it’s never been so actively _hot_ as right now, feeling the two distinct points press into your mouth. You lock your ankles over his flat ass and enjoy the way he tears at you, his fangs long and smooth and strange against your lips compared with a seadweller’s sharp flat triangles. You wait till he’s got his tongue all the way into your mouth, then grab him by the horns and _bite_.

His knees go out and the spikes on your leather jacket make a hideous, hilarious squeal as you go scraping down the front face of the thermal hull. You end up kind of sprawled in his lap, biting the hell out of his throat as he shivers and keens and scratches holes into your shirtfront with his ragged claws.

“You’re wearing too many fucking clothes,” he finally gasps.

“Says the cadaverous twerp in last sweep’s rags,” you retort, and give him another squeeze to the horns. He keens, loud and shaky, and goes limp all around you. You realize, with a thrill of truly profound joy, that he’s _even more sensitive around the horns than you are_. It takes hardly a nudge to spill him backwards across the floor, this endless stretch of heaving chest and floppy arms and ugly fucking t-shirt, and his glasses have gone all crooked. He doesn’t even adjust them, just flutters his hands up over your thighs, your sides, like he doesn’t know what to fucking do with himself.

And that’s the other amazing thing, the other fucking _beautiful_ thing. He doesn’t. He doesn’t know what to do. You’ve got the smartest boy you’ve ever had the misfortune to like splayed out between your thighs and he’s so transparently uncertain of his next move you want to laugh in his face. He looks like he’s going to jizz his pants if you so much as kiss him again. Did you ever look that fucking _virginal_? God, you hope not.

You kiss him again, lick right into that fang-strewn maw of his and make a spirited attempt to strangle him from the inside of his throat. His hands go tight and tense around your ribs as he chirrs and you’re not sure if he’s thrashing around to try and roll you over or if he’s just having an attack of the feels or what, but it’s some seriously half-assed bucking. It’s less of a challenge to ride out than that time Cronus had the hiccups.

“Are you going to fight me,” you mock him, “or am I going to fucking fall asleep up here?”

“Fuck you,” he gasps weakly. “Let go of my horns.”

“What, these?” you ask, “Which ones? You’ve got too many, you freak, you’re gonna have to be more specific,” and you go stroking the four of them all over just to watch him try and snarl. Teasing the inner curves of the smaller set make him go completely spare. Oh, fuck, stupid is such a pretty look on him, that lovely loose-mouthed gape. You feel like you’re on fire just from that wide-eyed stare. He looks at you like you’re—you’re not sure. Something more important than just _you_ , a decently cute kid doing his best to be a good lay. He looks at you some spooky hatchmate to the way Eridan looks at you sometimes, this intense, unnerving, scalding kind of focus. Like you’re a director, maybe, like what you want is all that matters. God, it’s nice.

“Get your shirt off,” you tell him, and his shoulders actually bunch before he remembers himself.

“Make me,” he sneers, and crosses his arms.

Challenge accepted. You scoot backwards till your ass encounters the warm, wiggling tent of his jeans. This is gonna hurt so nicely: you grind back, fast and mean, and you’re pretty sure his bright pupiless eyes cross.

“Cheap denim’s a bitch, bro,” you say sympathetically, and rock your hips. He actually bites his lower lip through the resultant whine, and his nails dig into his own forearms. He’s so amazingly responsive. You rub yourself, not very gently, against the pulse and push of the bulge trapped behind his fly, and you enjoy the way he just magnificently can’t hold on to his shit. Not even a minute in and he’s like a goddamn puppet for you, gasping when you want him to, shaking when you want him to. You want to see him fall apart. You want to fucking ruin him. You bat his loose hands away from his jeans, knowing he’s chafing with nearly as much pain as pleasure underneath the pressure. You want to see if you can really get him to come in his fucking pants. You want to see what he looks like _ashamed_.

“I thought I gave you an order,” you say, and tug on the hem of his shirt.

“I thought I told you to, to, hn, _Karkat_ , Karkat, oh, fuck, oh, god,” he pants. “Make me, you _SHIT_.” He’s got a few flecks of spit on his chin. It should be gross, but you lick his rough jaw and he keens and it’s so hot. He’s a fucking mess. You let your whole weight rest on his crotch, the delicate trapped mass of his bulge, and there, that should hurt. That should hurt really good.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he chants, and goes tearing at his shirt. “I, god, that _hurts_ , I fucking hate you, fuck!”

“Loathe you too, sweetmeat,” you purr, and smear your hands triumphantly up the stark hollow lines of his stomach. This is the kind of body cheap grubloaf affords a kid: you can count each rib, lowblood-sharp and not nostalgic. He could eat better if he gave a shit, if he took some risks, if he put himself out there, if he made himself useful. He was never you; he’s never needed blind stinking luck to make something of himself. he could be more than some dumbsit scrawny game-boy living out of his reconstitutor and buying all his clothes a size too big for extra growing room. He’s just never given enough of a shit to try, and all that wasted potential makes you kind of crazy. You skipped your last manicure appointment thinking of this date but they’re weekly and when you drag your nails down his ribs it only leaves pale gray lines, not welts. You want to fuck him up. You lean down and fasten your teeth around the inviting line of his clavicle, and when you taste fresh blood he makes a tiny crushed sound and shudders all over.

Your ass is wet. Mission fucking accomplished.

When you sit up his face is a vivid gray-gold study in shame. He actually looks like he might cry—there’s an orange sheen to one eye and a teal tint to the other. You feel very uncertain, all of a sudden, kind of sickeningly cold and scared all over.

“I’m going to kill you,” he says shakily, and sniffs, hard.

“Um,” you say, and scramble off him. “Sollux, I—I thought—you weren’t saying no, I thought—”

He sits up and surveys his body slowly, kind of disbelievingly, the dark soppy mess spreading from his lap and the thick drips of mustard rolling from his collarbone. He’s trembling all over.

“I’m sorry,” you say miserably, hugging your elbows. “Oh my god. Sollux. I’m sorry.”

“You’re going to be,” he snarls, and oh fuck you’ve heard that tone before—it’s the way he sounds when you beat him at something and he’s going to be a complete bitch about it till he gets even—and then all the clothes on your body _rip_.

“You shit-chewing motherfucker!” you yelp, scrabbling for the singed pieces of your pants, and then he starts laughing and you feel fucking ridiculous and you throw them at him. The fabric just goes fluttering down between the two of you, and you can’t help laughing too. As if you weren’t going to get naked, anyway.

“That outfit cost more than this damn hivestem, you ass,” you grumble.

Sollux has gone quiet, though. “And how much was _that_?” he asks, and you glance over at him. He looks very seriously, very intensely, at your crotch—not at the coil of your bulge, but at the inside of your thigh, where a lovemark courtesy of a very nice day in with Dualscar has been bitten into your soft flesh all big and dark and beautiful.

“What?” you ask.

“Your outfit,” Sollux says. “Your fucking earrings, KK, don’t tell me those aren’t pure gold, your fucking manicure and your makeup and your douchebag haircut and your soft stomach—” He nods at your leg. “Is that how you’re paying for it all? On your back?”

“Cute,” you snarl. “One of these nights you’re going to have to make up your mind, Captor. Am I my matesprit’s whore or his pet? Or, what else have you called me, his toy? Oh, wait, too many options! However are you going to deal with something that’s not a fucking black and white dichotomy?”

" _Matesprit_ ," he spits, his lip curling in ugly contempt. "That's the only one I don't believe."

Something very stupid goes _pop_ in your brain and you hurl yourself at him, fists first. The two of you bowl over, punching and hissing, and you end up flat on your back, hands pinned.

“What’s the matter,” he mocks. “Truth sting a little, pupa?”

“Your pus-studded nook’s going to sting when I yank it inside-out!” you scream. “How fucking dare you pretend what I do with my heart is the slightest piece of your business, you jealous quadrant-smearing freakshow!”

“It is when you go out of your way to shove it in my face,” he growls, fast and vicious. “You come in here decked out in a _hivestem’s_ worth of highblood fashion and you don’t let me forget for a minute who owns you! Pardon me, princess, for having a few fucking reservations about the contract! Did you even wipe the come off your thighs before you signed away your soul?”

“Oh my goodness me,” you say slowly. “I never thought about it like _fuck you in the eye with a fork!_ ”

You lunge upward as fast and sudden as you can, clipping him across the mouth with one blunt horn before he slams you back against the floor with the electric crackle of his power. Blood drips from his mouth and he doesn't _shut up_. He just laughs, pained and bitter, like you’re disappointing him.

"They got you so trained you sit up and simper any time someone turns a camera on you," he slurs. "They took away everything that makes you _you_ and then you go bragging to me about it, KK, you gloat about every fucking treat they balance on your nose for your cooperation. And now you want me to believe you’ve got any kind of two-way thing going on with him? You want to pretend you're _not_ this sweep's diversion?"

“He’s never had anyone like me before,” you hiss. “He hasn’t taken a matesprit since he was an officer.”

“No matesprit, and how many groupies?” Sollux sneers. “He’s old. He’s rich. He’s bored and he’s hungry for novelties. And you’re an idiot if you think for a minute he’s not going to chew you right up and spit you into the trash.”

You buck and squirm, but it doesn’t help much. You haven’t thought, you haven’t let yourself think. Haven’t wanted to wonder, like looking at it would ruin it, like not trusting the magic would dissolve it. Like in cartoons, where you can go running out past the edge of the cliff until you stop and look down. You hoped all your fucking life that you’d manage to matter to someone and then you did, you do, you just have to keep believing in it.

“He loves me,” you finally say, breathless and hurting, trying to just fucking _convey_ it all. “He does, I know he does. He calls me his soldier, Sollux.”

Sollux stares down into your face and you can watch him falling apart like it's being _diagrammed_ for you, that's how shitty he is at guarding his feelings. "Fuck this," he says, his voice suddenly choked and thick in his throat. He's blinking way too fast. "If your whole goddamn world revolves around him, then just fucking go. Before you get in trouble for slipping out of orbit." He lets you go and he's on the other side of the block before you can sit up. "You never could take a friend’s advice without having a fucking conniption about it."

You run your hands down your face and take a number of long, careful, unhelpful breaths. This feels terrible. You want to go back to the part where you had him by the horns and life was perfect. "Fuck," you say. "I don't want to go, okay? I just—shit. _Are_ we friends?"

He tries to laugh at you and chokes on it. " _You tell me_ , KK. You know when you didn’t come back home I fried everything in your hive that could receive a signal, trying to get an answer out of you? I thought you were dead until I saw you on the news, with him, in all that paint and everything—fuck you so hard, KK. Fuck you with a rusty culling fork. I thought you were _dead_."

"Stop it," you plead, getting up on shaky legs and going after him. "Stop it, you're a hideous wreck, goddamnit, don't you dare cry." You get him around the waist from behind and he tenses like he's expecting round two but you just hold on. He's so warm. You lay your cheek against his bare shoulderblade. After a minute his hands close around your forearms. You can feel his breathing start to even out, and it's a huge relief. You don't want to see him like that, weak and brittle with self-doubt, accepting defeat. He should be fighting. He should burn fierce and arrogant and unwilling to stay down. You’re queasy with shame and endlessly grateful he’s not shaking you off.

The cookalizer chimes before you can embarrass yourself much further. Sollux twitches, sniffs the air, and sneezes. “I can’t believe you brought over pepperoni,” he sighs, and you giggle. It’s absurd, but it feels good. You’re naked with your bulge hanging out and he’s got a big grotesque stain all across his thighs and the two of you just squelch off to the kitchenblock.

You ease the pizza out of the cookalizer and pull it in sections while he rummages around in his cabinets for plates, and when you turn around you get a face full of cleansing fiber sheet.  
You hold still, like you’ve learned to do for the makeup crew, and he just wipes at your eyes and your mouth, one long spindly hand cupped to the back of your head. The sheet’s rough and he scrubs too hard, stinging your eyelids, and you can’t help growling reflexively. But you fist your fingers and hold still for him, till he’s satisfied with your face and pulling your piercings off with the same focused precision as when he takes apart husktops. He sets each gold ring and gemstone on the greasy counter neatly, in two straight rows, and this shouldn’t be getting you so hot but it is. He wants to pull you apart, he wants to turn you back into his old friend, wants to claim some facet of you for his own. When he pulls back to look his work over you try to remember what it felt like, who you used to be. You give him a pissy frown, eyebrows together, nose a little scrunched, teeth kind of uncertainty bared.

“Better?” you grumble, and hunch your shoulders, going for shy, with a handful of defensive, maybe a pinch of needy. You flick your eyes to his, then away.

He _lights up._ “Yeah,” he says eagerly. “Yeah, KK, hi.”

You punch him in the shoulder, not too hard. Not too soft, either. “You motherfucker,” you say, and drop the act. Shoulders down, chin up, pissed off. “You really think you can just reset me like that?”

He looks like you just belted him in the bulge. “KK—”

“Let’s eat,” you say, and dump the pizza segments onto the plates. You take half and stalk off to his living block, flop onto his couch. You’re twitchy with nerves and resentment. You thought this shit would be so much easier, that you could just waltz in here like nothing had changed, or at least not for the worse, and that you could just sweep your old buddy off his feet and have a day of really great sex and not have it be monumentally weird and complicated, but you can’t, you can’t. You’re a stupid asshole. And this pizza tastes like shit.

“Karkat,” he says, drifting after you.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call,” you finally say. “I don’t... I don’t remember a lot of the first few perigees, okay? Don’t make fun of me for whatever contract I signed. If you’d been there... Everything was just so fucking amazing. And I guess I never thought you ever gave much of a shit about me in the first place. We were always fighting more than we weren’t. I mean, like, when I had the time to think about it I just kind of figured everyone I used to know was probably glad I wasn’t hassling them anymore.”

“I liked the fighting,” Sollux says, and eases on to the far end of the couch. “I missed the fighting.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. That’s kind of the whole point of this, you sad sack of waste. No one else drives me half as crazy. The fuck am I explaining kismesissitude to _you_ for?”

“As an illustration of your completely hilarious oral deformities.”

He sticks his split tongue out at you. On a dumbshit whim you lean forward and kiss him, wet and sloppy, and he makes a gorgeous startled _hrk!_ and falls back against the arm of the couch. There’s a brief scramble of elbows and knees and pizza and then both plates are set aside and he’s letting you straddle his hips again, his arms locked tight around your back like he thinks you’re going to change your mind at any moment. You kiss him till he’s whining high and liquid in the back of his throat, squirming for you.

Then you pull back.

“We can’t have what we used to have,” you tell him, breathing hard. “Or like, whatever we would have had if everything with Dualscar didn’t happen. I’m not that pointless little anklebiter you used to know, and I’m not going to pretend to be just to get you off. I’m me. I’ve grown. I’ve got a matesprit and I’m happy with him and I’m not giving that up just because you’ve got some problems with the arrangement. Now you can either share me like a fucking grownup or I wreck your shit, okay?”

“Can there be an ‘and’,” Sollux gasps. “I’ll share, _and_ you wreck me—”

Oh, fuck, that’s hot. "Deal," you say, and kiss him, all fangs and snarl. You taste his blood, sharp and almost sweet, and growl with pleasure at it.

Then _he_ pulls back, one hand clutched hard in your hair to keep you from following. "I'll share but," he says, panting hard. "But. I won't sit on my ass and diddle myself in silence while you let that bastard play you like a puppet. If he’s your matesprit, he’s your matesprit, KK, and you’re your own guy, regardless of whoever’s bulge you’re riding. I’m not sharing you with your _master._ You wanna be someone’s toy, you wanna waste yourself on that, I’ll scream the fucking moons down—"

"What quadrant were you angling for again?" you ask, raising an eyebrow skeptically. Red and blue wells up from his eyesockets, seething and sparking, and you kiss him warmly. "No, it's okay. That's fair. That's—that's good. I’d be disappointed if you didn’t give me shit for being stupid." You did kind of let yourself get distracted for those first few perigees, didn't you? Distracted, maybe bowled over. Having someone poised to go savaging at your soft bits when you let yourself get too sloppy will be good for you. It'll keep you from having more dipshit sanity lapses like the "let's get lowblood drugs" adventure.

You like it, too, this eager building anger, this sharpness. Cronus and Eridan have each other to scratch and bite, for all that maybe they shouldn’t, but you’re always minding your manners, letting the makeup crew file down your claws. Letting Dualscar remind you how small you are, how sweet you can be, how nice kindness feels. But now you’ve got Sollux pressed flat beneath you and you feel strong like this, strong and fierce and giddy with it, biting him raw.

And he bites you back, is the best part of all of it, till you’re squirming flat on top of him, rutting your bulge along one sharp-ridged hipbone. His fingers twine through your hair, stroking and clawing in turns and it feels so nice just to play back and forth with this hot edge of black and fangs and challenge and then get soothed back down with a soft touch and a lot of tongue. He’s so warm, so amazingly warm, and you’re fucking mad for him, keening rough and eager—

Then he clamps his hands on your horns and rolls the both of you off the couch.

You hit the ground with a shock that drives all the breath clean out of you, and smash the tip of one horn against a plate. Pain sheets through you—fuck, that was the same horn you cracked in that stupid brawl—and you convulse, breathless and wordless with the overload. You can hear Sollux laughing triumphantly, through the ringing in your ears and the frantic wardrum battering of your bloodpusher. Ordinarily this’d be the time someone puts a halt in the proceedings and checks you over, gives you some space. But this isn’t ordinary, this is your kismesis getting one over on you, and the pain just makes everything sizzle. This is a fucking _fight_. You take a deep breath, cock a fist back, your freshly-scarred arm twinging with this sharp awful misfire of nerves, and get him right in the throat. He falls over to the side like a felled tree, flashing like a strobe light and making beautiful wet noises. Now you’re both strapped for a proper breath.

“Ha,” you say. “And... also ha.”

Sollux gags for a while. “Nggh,” he finally mumbles. “That was... not fun.”

“What, losing?”

He shoves at your face with one sweat-clammy hand. “Shut up.”

“You shut up.”

“ _You_ shut up.”

“You... you should. Uh. Let me at your bulge already.”

Sollux lies there, still panting, but his eyes get really big. “Okay,” he says. “Um. Make me.”

You roll him back over for what feels like the umpteenth time, and fumble at the catch of his jeans. The wet stain’s going tacky, _urgh_. When you peel his pants off him, his bulge and his briefs and his jeans have just sort of fused into one disgustingly gooey mess. You tug at where his bulge has managed to tie itself together with the crotch of his underwear and he makes a hilarious squeaky noise and claws at you, trying to struggle upright.

“Don’t, don’t, that’s weird,” he gasps.

“Oh my god, you fucking noob,” you laugh, and lick at the root of his bulge. It coils up eagerly into your mouth, disentangling from the fabric, and Sollux completely loses his shit, shuddering and sparking, uncoordinated as hell.

“Fuck,” he moans, and you’ve never heard him so overwhelmed. His fingers fumble into your hair again, clench tight. “Fuck, Karkat.”

It’s not the same as it was earlier, you riding the high of nerves and adrenaline, treating him like a set-piece, but it’s still a rush how easily you can bowl him over. This is the smartest kid you know, and when you suck his bulge he sounds like a moron.You bob your head a few times, tonguing along his length, then pull it out and let it tangle with your fingers. Holy shit, it’s forked too, maybe an inch from the tip, with kind of a seam running up a while further. That’s somewhere between the freakiest thing you’ve ever seen and the hottest thing you’ve ever seen.

“Take notes on how I’m taking you apart, hotshot,” you say, “there’s gonna be a test later,” and your voice is so low, so rough, and he just whimpers and nods four times fast, and everything’s amazing right now. You tease that strange cleft with your thumb and twine your fingers back and forth around the rest of his length and you just can’t get over how hot he is: his equipment isn’t that much different from Eridan’s in size, maybe longer and a bit thinner, but he’s just so warm, as warm as you are.

When you lick into his nook he’s so tight and so hot you find yourself moaning, too, totally carried away with how fucking new and exciting this all is. He even tastes different than the Amporas, less salty and more bitter-sharp and that’d be some repellently sleazy analogy for the guy himself if you weren’t tasting it, weren’t fucking burying yourself in him. Your bulge is pinned between your stomach and your thigh and it’s not enough, however close and tight the fit is—it’s just you up against yourself and you want more but you’re determined get Sollux off before you break. His nook clenches and pulls at your tongue and you angle up, inwards, your arm slung over his hips to keep him still as he writhes and curses. You’re gonna get him off with just your mouth, see how he likes it, see him come undone just from that, if he wants your damn bulge he can fucking well beg for it.

And he does, he judders and shakes and moans out “Karkat, KK, please, please, I need you—” god, you’re so close to coming just from the power trip. You pull back and grin when that makes him howl. He claws at you, uncoordinated and furious, trying to wrestle you back down and completely unable to, and you make sure he’s looking right at you when you squeeze his bulge and run your tongue over that doubled tip, letting your eyelashes flutter closed.

“Mmh, Sollux,” you sigh.

He comes with a beautiful, breathless gasp, like you just killed him.

Fuck, you’re so ready you’re actually shaking, fighting down desperate chirps on every breath. If he so much as breathed on your bulge you’d go off like a firework. You force yourself to sit up straight, to swallow down your racing pulse and pat his trembling thigh firmly, to not look like you’d stab the Empress for the chance to bury your aching bulge up that warm, dripping nook already. You’re the one with experience here, the one ahead, and you’ve gotta keep your edge.

You get up. You get a plate of cold, half-eaten, grease-sticky pizza, you take a very deliberate bite, and you chew. It tastes unbelievably cheap and gross. You can’t believe you ever thought this shit was food. You take another bite. You can feel your pulse in the very tip of your bulge, practically stinging, and you know the steady drip from your nook isn’t making your detached act as convincing as it could be.

“Fuck’s sake,” Sollux growls blearily. “You’re really gonna do that now?”

“It’s not like there’s anything more interesting happening,” you sneer. “If you want to call it a day already maybe I should just leave you to your fucking coma—”

He sits up, and psionics slap the plate out of your hand.

“Cute,” you say, and lose the pizza in the same way. It’s gamegrub chow now, and good riddance.

Sollux grabs you by one ankle and _yanks_. You think the prickle along your skin is because he's using his psionics for extra leverage, and then your glutes hit the floor and he's on top of you with most of his weight in the forearm pinned across your hips. He bares his teeth and you ride out a second of utter panic because what if he just tears into your bulge—

And then he's biting down on your thigh, hard, catching the already-tender spot where Dualscar left you bruised. You choke, desperate to keep quiet, as he sucks on that spot hard enough to make you gasp. When he lets go the mark is fresh and vivid with new blood, and he looks up at you for one seething, furious instant before he bites you on the other side, over and over, obviously trying to compensate for his smaller bite radius and duller fangs with sheer persistence. You'd laugh—everything has to be duality with him, always—except that it hurts so good, and the longer he works on your thigh the more desperately want him on your bulge, up your nook, want him to just _touch your fucking junk_ already.

"You, fuck, Sollux, you f-festering bulgeblister, you're completely, hh, off-target," you manage, and your bulge writhes south far enough to slap him across the cheek, which you would give yourself points for if you'd done it on purpose.

"Am I?" he asks, and then he pinches the fresh bruise he's just given you, sharp twinging pain that makes your bulge lash helplessly against your belly. "I'm not so sure about that. I'm pretty satisfied with this."

"You loathsome, revolting waste of space," you say helplessly. You should have figured he'd be a quick study. "I know you m-must be terrified of choking on it but I'm, hh, disappointed you're not even going to try."

He smirks at you. How has he recovered so fast? You had him wrecked. You want to wreck him again. "Pretty fucking transparent," he says. "Try again."

You take a deep breath. "If I came all this way to make you a fucking pizza and eat you out, and you turn out to be too much of a _cringing wiggler_ to give my junk any attention, I will be _sick_ with contempt."

"Getting warmer," he says. He curls his hand around just the root of your bulge and squeezes, and his eyes glow when you hiss. He leans down just far enough to lick the very tip of your bulge, each tongue-tip teasing you separately. Holy fuck, you didn't know they could do that.

"More," you keen, "you miserable, vicious little shit, more." The whole length of your bulge throbs with the need for more attention. Your nook is a steady, empty ache.

"You need it," he prompts you, his voice a low, raw growl.

You toss your head, fighting your pride. "Yes," you grit through clenched teeth, and then you know exactly what he wants you to say and you decide that if you say it before he prompts you then _you're_ winning, because you're getting him to cooperate. "Fuck you, Sollux, come on, _please!_ " you moan and you're right, that's right, that's the password—he shoves his fingers up your nook and gets an actual mouthful of your bulge and you come ridiculously fast, spasming around his fingers, spilling out of his mouth and down his chin.  
You gasp and shake, and somewhere in the process you get Sollux in a tight hug, arms aching around his bony rack of ribs. He clicks his teeth against one of your horns.

“So about that test,” he murmurs.

“You fail,” you tell him breathlessly. “You’re awful.”

“You seemed to be enjoying yourself well enough.”

“Before you cream yourself over your imaginary sexual prowess, be told that I was envisioning a heap of toxic sewage. It was prettier than you and also smelled better.”

"Your kinks are completely depraved and you should be ashamed of admitting that," he says, but when he bites your ear he doesn't really put any force behind it.

You let your head rest back against the seat of his saggy, gross old couch and he nips at you, careful and slow, like he’s cataloguing you. Whatever makes your breath hitch he does longer, harder, with more tongue, and you’ve never been amused and irritated so perfectly simultaneously. It gives you an excuse to keep hanging on to him, anyway, which would be embarrassingly flush of you if his teeth against your throat weren’t coaxing out helpless growls. He’s like the world’s boniest heating unit, and it’s so _nice_. He slips a few fingers back up your nook, smooth and easy, and you can’t help panting as he teases you. You’re used to this state, undone enough for everything to feel so comfortable, so nice, but it’s different with an opponent instead of a partner. A nagging sense that he’s catching up to you, winning this round, keeps you from really relaxing into the building pleasure. You don't want to just lie here and get done, like you might with your matesprit or his boys. You want to make sure he's falling apart at _least_ as much as you are. He’s your rival, for fuck’s sake. You can’t just give in.

Okay, strategy time. If you actually try to make this a fight, you're dead. You can hold your own in a brawl against bigger opponents, and you’ve even managed to get the drop on Sollux a few times so far, but Mister Douchebag Eye Lasers has a trump card you can't easily neutralize. On the other hand... On the other hand, he's fingering you and you can still make your way from one end of a thought to the other. You'd bet he doesn't have nearly enough practice to be able to do the same. There's your plan of attack.

You reach for him and cup his face in both hands. He goes still, shoulders tense, watching you nervously. You lean in to kiss him, slow and gentle, barely teasing at his weird bifurcated tongue.

"KK," he says unsteadily, pulling back a little. "You're... You're not flipping on me, are you?"

You smile. "No," you say. You pitch your voice as low and tender as you can. "I'm going to completely and totally destroy you, you disturbing package of festering neurosis. Without even having to get rough."

He's so transparently freaked out, and equally transparently trying to hide it. There you go. You're back in control of things now. “What if I like it rough?” he blusters, digging his claws into you, and you just run your tongue along his jaw, dip in along his aural shell, soft and light, and relish the choked little whine that wins you.

"You poor sorry piece of shit. You don't even know what you like yet," you tell him, sweetly condescending. "But don't worry. I have enough experience to show you."

He goes tense all over with sparking rage, and you catch the lobe of his aural shell between your teeth as delicately as you can. He swallows a growl. "I'm not f-fucking convinced."

You grin, because you're _entirely_ convinced now that this is a good plan. "I'll take that as a challenge."

"Let's see what you've got, then," he says, but he hasn't completely managed to keep his voice from shaking.

You smile. "Here, let me take care of you, sugargrub." His fingers make a wet, nasty noise when you pull his hand from between your legs, and he goes completely still when you raise them to your mouth.

“Karkat?” he gasps.

“Yes, Sollux?” you respond, and take the dripping red tip of his index pad between your lips.

“K-Karkat, fuck,” he moans, and you run your tongue out, sucking at your own fluid, cleaning down one side of his finger and then the other, the delicate skin between his fingers. His free hand gropes clumsily for your shoulder, he’s racked with tremors. You bring his three fingers together into your mouth and suck, hard, letting him feel some teeth against the beginning of his palm and he actually convulses.

“Yeah, thought so,” you purr, going back to just delicately kissing each fingerpad. “You’re so fucking easy, aren’t you? How long have you been waiting, huh? Wanting this? Wanting _anything?_ ” When you kiss his wrist he just whimpers. He looks absolutely shattered, absolutely helpless, and you feel like a god. “Long enough to get desperate,” you tease him. “Long enough to just fucking go to pieces for anyone—”

“For _you_ ,” he gasps out. “Wanted _you_.”

Okay. That’s a thing. That’s an intriguing thing, a thing that your bulge is intrigued with as well as your suddenly racing pump biscuit. His free hand’s clenched tight around your nape so you just swirl your tongue around his palm, raise your eyebrows.

“You never knew,” Sollux says. “You never... didn’t you, you didn’t even fucking guess how much I wanted you.”

You can’t really help the noise that your throat makes at that.

Sollux doesn’t even look smug. He just looks... intense, alight. Savage. “You keep throwing it all in my face,” he hisses. “You keep reminding me, how much more I want you, how much more I’ve wanted you, wanted to make you mine, well, fuck you, you audacious little bulgeweal, you don’t get to blow your smug fucking load over long I’ve been waiting for this chance to get back—”

He yanks his hand out of your mouth and pulls you up his body, his face so set with fury you half expect him to bite off your nose. Instead he brings your lips together soft as sopor, and runs his warm forked tongue-tips along your lower lip tender enough to send a bright bolt of heat all down your vertebrae. You whimper.

“Yeah,” he hisses, “yeah, fuck you in your stupid face!” Then you’re kissing again, weird and slow, feeling everything. You can hear his pulse, the chirpy rasp of his breath, the faint creak of his knuckles tensing against your neck, the way he holds you so tight and touches you like he’s relishing every fucking microsecond of contact.

“That get you hot,” he finally mutters, pulling back a little, “getting your sewer-mouth worshipped? Fuck, it does, look at you. You little attention whore. Hate you. Hate you so much.”

You growl and he growls back and you bite his mouth, tonguing ferociously at the split in his lip. He shudders and pulls free.

“What if, what if I told you, hhn, ‘bout every night I sat up jerking myself to our arguments,” he gets out, and oh, fuck. Is he lying? If he’s not— _fuck_. You moan. He laughs breathlessly and goes on, “What if I told you what I thought about, in, in the shower, or, or, or on our movie dates, in the theatre, never paid any attention to your awful waste of space films, just, just wanted you, sitting there, in the dark, fighting you for candy I didn’t even like, wanted to, fuck, KK, wanted to push you out of your seat right there, take you on the filthy floor, let everyone watch _us_. I’d do it, I’d do you, now, then, tomorrow, any time, let everyone see what’s mine.”

“Oh god,” you whimper. Your head’s spinning. The last time you felt this frighteningly aroused you’d eaten something weird and ended up fucking the boys from one end of the night to the next. “Oh, g-god, Sollux, you, you didn’t, wouldn’t, no—”

“Yeah,” he says, and laughs again. “Yeah, yes, I would, would in a heartbeat, half of one. Lemme have you.”

“ _Please!_ ”

He reaches down between you and adjusts himself, and you find yourself being sunk on to his bulge. It might not be that much longer than Eridan’s, not much at all compared to your other partners’, but it feels like it takes forever, this tense, gradual filling, and he’s just so fucking _warm_. You’re suddenly not at all sure which of you is running this show.

God, he learns fast.

"How does it feel," you ask, trying to get control back, trying to stop feeling so _taken_. "How does it feel to have the real thing? Better than you could dream up in your sad lonely imagination?"

He bites you right beneath the jaw. "Course it's better," he snarls. "Course it's better to really have you be _mine_." Your nook spasms around him, and his bulge throbs. It moves differently than what you're used to, these whiplash motions that start almost languid and then build to vicious.

Sollux purrs, and even his purr sounds like it's angry and challenging. His hands drop to your thighs, to the bitemarks there, and he pinches the bruises hard. "Mine," he says again, just as one of those whip-strokes snaps inside you, and you choke.

"Fuck," you groan helplessly, digging your stupid short claws into his shoulders, trying to brace yourself. "Fuck, fuck you, Sollux."

"Hehe, later," he says. "Right now it's me fucking you."

You groan at that, loud and drawn out and contemptuous, because he's terrible and obnoxious and you want him so badly it's making you sick. Then you roll your hips into his and squeeze your inner walls tight all around him and relish the way that smug grin just drops away. “Are you now,” you say softly, and grind down into him again.

“Shhhhit,” he hisses, his head lolling back against the couch’s arm, and you take the opportunity to lap at his racing pulse. His hands go to your thighs and hold you tight, his long thumbs digging into your bruises, worrying at them. You can feel whole sections of your brain shutting down at that, at how fucking good the pain is. From the broken little whine Sollux is making as you ride him you’re at least shutting some of his pan matter down at the same time.

Gentle, you remember. You hold on to that thought. Soft, and, and thorough, relentless, and you brush licks and kisses against the jumping muscles of his neck, each ear. His mouth opens eagerly under yours, and you let yourself fall into him again, that weirdass fucking tongue of his.

One of his hands leaves your thighs, and you let out the worst noise when you feel him stroke your bulge. He takes hold of it carefully, squeezing so delicately you almost bite him, just trying not to come there and then. It’s a lot to deal with.

You grab hold of his horns in retaliation, wrench yourself up and away, panting hard. You can feel him try and follow your mouth, and his tongue lolls out past his teeth as he struggles. He’s amazing like this, naked and struggling up against you, moaning low in his throat. He kind of realizes what a strung-out sloppy beast you’ve reduced him to at the same moment you do. He takes a deep, shuddery breath, arches underneath you, and goes limp again.

“Fuck,” he says, and grins up at you. “Fucking... _wow_.”

Shit, that smile—what are you meant to do with this? It’s like every reluctantly appreciative smirk you’ve ever won out of him concentrated into just this one slice of teeth. Every time you managed to beat him at a game or make him laugh or tripped him in the hallway, only more, realer, you are suddenly struck by the monumental improbability that is you, here and now, riding the hell out of your best friend's bulge. Being held down against him so _tightly_ , like you’re the only thing he could ever want. It’s too much, and he likes you so much, you feel tense and amazed and terrified you’re going to fuck this up. You want, absurdly, to apologize.

“Don’t stop,” he mutters, still smiling, like he knows exactly what's going on in your head right now. “I can take you, I got you, don’t you fucking stop.”

Okay. "I know you can," you tell him, and you thumb the inner curves of his horns to watch the way his face goes slack. "You push me." You kiss him. "You keep up with me." Another kiss, and you catch his lip between your teeth just long enough to taste him. "You want me to be yours," and your voice cracks then because _fuck_ that's still outrageously hot, "then just. Just. Keep going. Let me f-feel it when you stake that claim."

The sound he makes is raw and desperate, a mangled sob. The air crackles around you with the sharpness of his powers and then you're feeling him touching you _everywhere_ , the red-and-blue swell of his psionics cocooning the pair of you and sparking tenderly possessive over your whole body. The psionics don’t just stop at your skin, the touch intersects all through you. You can feel that prickling heat sliding against your fucking bones; it’s terrifying.

“Fuck you,” he snarls, so rough you almost can’t understand him, “this isn’t—’m not _claiming_ , you’re mine, you’re already, you’re fucking mine, if anyone else—if I was just one of—if anyone tried to, to take you, take you away again—” he swallows, hard, frustrated at his own incoherence. He squeezes your hips. “I’d kill them.”

“Holy shit,” you squeak, like an idiot.

He just blazes up at you, literally shining, his eyes welling over with light and power and you’re transfixed. You believe him.

“Whole world can love you,” he grits out. “Kiss your ass. Jerk it to your act. But I get this.”

" _Yes_ ," you sob. It's the only thing you can possibly say, the only answer you can possibly give him. "Yes, yes, Sollux, yes. Yours. Fuck. Fuck, so close—"

"Give it to me," he demands, his psionics curling around and _through_ your bulge, touching you like nobody else ever has or ever _could_ , and you lose it, your nook convulsing around him and your bulge painting his stomach crimson.

You wail, scrabbling at his shoulders, and then he yanks you down flush against him which even while you're coming feels a little gross and squelchy but he’s shaking like he’s going to split apart, so you wrap your arms around him and squeeze.

“Come on, come on, you too,” you keen, and do your best to keep grinding down on him, clenching at his frantically lashing bulge even as the aftershocks actually sting.

“No, nnnh, I’m, I’m fine, I could do this a-aaaanh, all n-night,” he pants out, which is just so transparently a lie—he’s dripping with sweat, for fuck’s sake, only admirably bugshit levels of spite are keeping him coherent at this point and he practically had to assemble that sentence letter by letter—you just start laughing.

“You’re so close,” you tell him, rocking hard and fast and mean down against him. “Come on, nookweal, tell me again how long you really think you’re gonna last.”

He opens his mouth and just goes “Fffhgnnnaa!”, then looks so aghast at himself you can’t help losing your shit. He smacks at your horns and you laugh like an idiot and somewhere in there he just kind of subsides, twitching and moaning and looking pissed as hell about everything. You nuzzle the tip of your noses together, still giggling at the grand immensity of his sheer insulted pique. This time when you bear down on him he goes under. His climax is a gorgeous rattling thing that evidently surprised him: it blanks his expression and catches his whole frame up into convulsions and he rakes his claws down your back. When you squall with pain he just bucks up into you again, weak and sloppy, and moans like an imbecile. Fuck, you think you’re bleeding.

You pull off him and he shivers again, clutches at you like he’s dazed. When you snap your fingers in front of his face he just blinks a few times, slow and dopey, and then bites your hand. You grin helplessly and bap him on the snout. "Fuck-drunk is such a good look on you," you tell him.

"Mmmn," he says. "Choke on my fucking bulge," but he's grinning back, and when he pulls you in close again with his psionics it turns out to be just so that he can kiss you, wet and sloppy and comfortable.

“Y’want me to?” you offer.

“Ffngh. Whuh?”

You walk your fingers back down his body, and his psionics itch at your hand before you even get to his stomach.

“God, no, don’t touch it, it’ll fall off,” he mutters. “Just stay. Here.”

“Are you falling asleep?”

“No.”

“You’re falling asleep.”

“Nmnf.”

You let him tuck your head under his chin and wear you like a blanket, and despite all the places where parts of you ache or throb or sting you're still pretty content. Despite, hell, maybe because of them. They're trophies, right? You've just had one hell of a date with your kismesis. You _have_ a kismesis. The real fucking thing, someone who wants to push you and fuck with you and refuse to let you be anything less than your best. Someone who wants you like that, and wants you enough that he'd take on any challenge to get to you. It’s like there's a fire trapped behind the cage of your thoracic struts—banked now, maybe, just glowing coals right this minute, but ready to flare back up any time.

Sollux heaves a deep breath underneath you and melts into his now-even-grosser couch, going ragdoll limp as he does fall asleep after all. Idiot. _Your_ idiot, your best friend and rival, who makes you feel so stupidly tender any time he's not making you want to shove him just to see him struggle for balance.

You give him another minute to be sure he's actually out, and then shift yourself carefully out of his lap. He doesn't even move. He's lucky you're friends, or he'd be in serious trouble about now.

He doesn't wake up even when you pick him up off the couch. He's fucking heavy—you clearly need to get back in the habit of working out if you want to be able to throw him around on a regular basis. For now you stagger into his respiteblock and dump him into his recuperacoon. His eyelids flicker and he slurs something as he sinks ungracefully into the slime. You catch your name but you can't quite make out the rest.

"Yeah," you say anyway. "Pitch for you, pukeblister."

Your next stop is his little cell of an ablution block. Sollux can sleep in his spunk like a cavetroll and you deeply hope he stains, but you’re itching to get clean. While you’re rummaging around for the least-gross smelling towel you catch sight of your wounds in the block’s single tiny mirror.

Holy shit.

You have to crane your head over your shoulder to get a look at what he's done to your back, but _fuck,_ that's impressive. You look like you had a disagreement with a dragon. You’re actually still bleeding in a few places, and you probably need to get some dermal tape on this shit. You wonder if he clawed you up deep enough to scar. He'll be so insufferable if he did.

It'd be hot, though.

The soap is not kind to your valiant battle damage, but the sting and the sharp crisp smell of it helps wake you up again. You feel good by the time you’re clean, weary as hell but good. Strong. Fierce. Badass. You leave all his nasty towels floating in the tub.

Clothes are an issue. Yours are shredded, and his are lunatic amounts of huge. You’re pretty sure some of these sad tents would fit Cronus, and he’s been on a growth spurt lately. Sollux’s wardrobifier is also encrypted, and your head’s starting to pound with tiredness, so that’s out. You finally settle on cuffing a pair of his jeans up three times and ripping up one of his shirts with your teeth so the hemline settles closer to your hips than your fucking shins. It still looks like a dress and screams ‘guess who’s stolen their boyfriend’s shit!’ but... maybe you don’t mind that particular fashion statement.

The door isn’t too tricky to wedge back into the doorframe. With some fidgeting it looks completely impregnable and hardly at all like three separate chunks of chitin and a handful of jigsawed splinters. Should fool everyone long enough for him to get a new door. Or enough sleep to fight off actually malicious hive invaders. This isn’t really a good neighborhood. ...Then again, your boyfriend has eye lasers. If he gets mugged it’s his own damn look out.

You spend maybe a little too long carefully smoothing at the cracks in the door splinters.

It doesn’t take much of a walk to find a shuttlebug cruising the cramped and filthy lanes between hivestems. You wave it down and the driver pokes her head out of the front cab, looks you up and down. She looks a lot more derisive than the last cabbie but then again you are no longer wearing a hivestem’s worth of high fashion. Sollux is probably going to slag your jewelry down for husktop parts and pat himself on the ass for being all daring and hardcore. You feel absurdly warm and fuzzy just thinking about it. 

“Where to?” the cabbie wants to know.

You give her Zodiac Records' address. Her nose wrinkles. “And you’re gonna pay for that with...?”

Shit, your credit card was in your pants. Your completely obliterated pants. “Look,” you say, “you got a phone?”

“Yeah, why,” she says suspiciously.

“Take a fucking picture of me and sell it to the damn tabloids,” you say, and gesture at yourself. “There’s your fucking pay.”

“What, like you’re someone famous,” she says, unimpressed, and your heart plummets into your digestion sack. But then she squints and goes, “Hey, wait, I did see you on the ‘feeds. You’re that little weirdblooded guy everyone’s been talking about! Holy shit, did you just get lucky up there with a _lowblood?_ ”

“Karkat Vantas,” you say instead of _wow fuck you_ , and stick your hand up. You half expect her to retreat back into her cab, disgusted at your presumption—you know your knuckles are all raw and bright and gross—but she just does that thing everyone’s been doing lately and clasps your hand with a big smile. Like you’re giving her a treat, letting her have a look at something special, not just the same mutant paw you’ve always had.

“Vantas, right, yeah. Shit, you’re so warm,” she marvels, turning your hand back and forth instead of just shaking it. “You really do have red blood. Are you magic or something?”

“You’re going to get something like a hundred credits for driving me home if you sell this scandal to the right imprints, so, yeah,” you say, and let yourself into her cab. “I’m magic as hell.”

She laughs as if you've actually said something funny, instead of just being a little shit who's too tired to bargain politely. "I can't believe this. All the cabs in the city and you flagged down mine, right?"

You dredge up a nice camera smile from somewhere. "Somebody's got to get lucky, right? Might as well be your turn." You tune out her answer, really.

The shuttlebug pulls away from the curb and you lean back against the seat, feeling the burn of the scratches along your back. You're exhausted, your everything hurts, and if Sollux finds your credit card before you get hold of someone in accountermeasures to cancel it he's probably going to do immense amounts of damage to your expense account. You close your eyes.

It's fucking great to be alive.

_Maybe time will tell you_  
 _Why I got so much hell to sell you_  
 _Please, please understand me_  
 _Oh you can't just dance around me_  
—Gaslight Anthem, "Here Comes My Man" 


End file.
